Lightroom vs. Photoshop

Lightroom often seems to be overlooked as Photoshop’s odd little sibling and while it doesn’t offer Photoshop’s in-depth image editing capabilities there’s still plenty it can do to make your photographic life easier.

The main difference to remember is that Lightroom is a catalog of all your images and as such offers many ways to locate images far beyond which folder it is stored in, other search criteria can involve:

Date Taken

Camera Used

Lens Used

Focal Length

ISO Used

Facial Recognition

Map (where the image was taken)

Rating (1-5 stars)

Colour Labels

Flags

Keywords

Collections (manually grouping images, regardless of where they are stored on the hard-drive)

Images that have been published to external websites such as Flickr and 500px

And there are plenty more search options to choose from beyond these. Some of these will require you to tag images as you process them, but some are automatically maintained such as date taken, camera used, lens used etc.

The Metadata flag in the "Library Filter" is a good place to start learning some of the standard options that are available: